The Rules of the Rules of Magic, or, Why Magic with Rules Rules

You shouldn't have to base fictional magic on real-world magic, for the simple reason that there's no real-world magic

Witch

On this corner: the Brandon Sanderson faction, which proclaims that magic in fantasy stories should have rules.

And on this corner: the N. K. Jemisin faction, which proclaims that magic in fantasy stories should not have rules.

These two authors aren't the founders of their respective factions, but they're the ones who have respectively written their most accessible summations. Supporters of Yay Rules think of magic as something much more important than a tool for the characters: it's a tool for the author, and thus cannot just be thrown at the wall to see whether it will work this time. Supporters of Boo Rules think of magic as a vibe, a feel, part of the charm of inhabiting a realm fundamentally different from Earth, and thus it would die if it were forced to follow the rigid rules of our physical world.

What I see is two mutually unintelligible languages. From the Yay Rules perspective, magic is an aid to plotting, so it obeys rules of cause and effect. From the Boo Rules perspective, magic is an aid to worldbuilding, so it follows aesthetic preference. That is why, in the essays I linked above, Sanderson is concerned with how magic lets you resolve the plot, whereas Jemisin is concerned with what magic feels like. They're asking different things of magic because they have different notions of what magic does in a story. You will expect magic to make rational sense if your starting assumption is that what magic does in fantasy is a question of writing craft. You will expect magic to instead be awe-inspiring and ineffable if your starting assumption is that what magic does in fantasy is a question of writing style.

As for me, my allegiance is with Yay Rules. Give me all your intricate systems of arcane calculations, your cyclical calendars of mystical energies, your periodic table of primordial essences. Show me the structure. Show me the limits. It's a lot more fun to write within limits. (I mean, it's more fun for me. I can't, and shouldn't, aspire to eradicate all fiction with numinous magic; what I'm doing in this essay is to describe why numinous magic doesn't work for me.) If you want your fictional magic to hook me, go to the trouble of asking yourself how your magic is integrated into the building blocks of your universe. And I can already hear the Boo Rules people protest: But that kills the sense of wonder! And my response is: What I seek when I read fantasy isn't the sense of wonder.

Let me explain. In most conventional fantasy, if you step into an enchanted forest and meet a flower that speaks fluent English, wonder would be the appropriate reaction to have (whereas in magical realism, if you step into an enchanted forest and meet a flower that speaks fluent English, your reaction is to go on with your day because talking flowers are nothing to marvel at). A sense of wonder is not the appropriate reaction if you happen to not know where rainbows come from, and therefore feel transcendent awe every time one appears. Alas, that's the reaction human beings had for thousands of years until Newton figured out how rainbows form. Rainbows didn't lose their charm; we lost the misconception that there was any charm to look for. Rainbows didn't switch from mysterious to ordinary; we became aware that they had always been ordinary.

Where I look for my sense of wonder is in the expansion of human reach that is described in the hardest of science fiction. Magic reminds me too much of the parts of our reality that cause me no wonder at all, because they don't cause anything. (And I write this as someone who used to devour the Harry Potter movies, and still laments that the Lord of the Rings movies have way too little magic.)

Fiction is sometimes described as following an implicit pact between writer and reader: the writer pretends this is true, and the reader pretends to buy it. Well, I don't believe in that pact. I don't concede my suspension of disbelief by default. You want my suspension of disbelief? Work to earn it. Oh, your story has magic? Work harder. And you're going to have it even harder if your idea of fictional magic relies on the conventions of mystical belief systems that have existed in the real world. That's where my suspension of disbelief is completely lost.

To illustrate this point: about a year ago, a Twitter user with the handle Bright__Whitney posted this:

One thing that drives me crazy about Western fantasy literature with “magic systems” is that magic is a spiritual technology in every real world culture.

Setting aside for a moment the outrageousness of the very concept of “spiritual technology,” Bright__Whitney's point is that magic does not belong to the realm of the natural sciences (sort of like D&D arcane magic), but to the realm of spirituality (sort of like D&D divine magic), and therefore fantasy authors should write magic as something deeply personal and unrepeatable instead of as an ordered progression of deducible laws. The reason why this piece of writing advice results in stories that won't satisfy me is that taking real-world cultures as your example for devising fictional magic gives me as a reader mismatching expectations. If you want your fictional culture of spellcasters to evoke in me that oh-so-important sense of wonder, don't draw inspiration from, say, the ancient Norsemen, who seriously thought that the rainbow was a bridge to the home of the gods.

This is why I'm not convinced by this part of Jemisin's essay:

In most cultures of the world, magic is intimately connected with beliefs regarding life and death—things no one understands, and few expect to.

That's all fine and dandy—if you're doing anthropology. If you're doing fiction, you can't rely on how real cultures understand magic, because their practices never produce any actual magic. Jemisin fails to see this key issue when she goes on to add:

Magic [...] can be affected by belief, the whims of the unseen, harsh language.

This statement reveals the error in Jemisin's line of reasoning. “Belief causes magic” is what the people involved in mystical practices think happens. But it's not what happens. What happens in the real world is that believers in the supernatural sing their incantations, or consume their herbs, or beseech their tutelary spirits, or offer their sacrifices... and that's it. Beyond a probably intense, sometimes life-altering emotional experience (which is no different from what you might get from standing in the presence of sublime art), nothing more happens as a result of the mystical ritual. In our world there are no magical effects. In our world it is known for a fact that the event A of burning Iphigenia alive can never produce the event B of bringing wind for the Greek fleet, and a story that makes the claim that that particular A leads to that particular B is going to have to make a really big effort to win my investment.

The only way I can enjoy a story with numinous magic is if the magic itself isn't the main focus of the story. This is the same approach recommended by Sanderson in his essay: if you invent a world where a preacher can use prayers to (only sometimes) remove tumors, don't make the entire plot hinge on removing a tumor.

And that's before we get into rituals that are explicitly described as lacking a reliable result. The idea that magic in fantasy is not supposed to make sense comes from noticing that all the mystical rituals that are performed in all human cultures have at best a coincidental link to the occurrence of the desired effect. And this is so because in the real world magic doesn't work, because supernatural forces don't exist. The preacher who claims to be able to remove tumors with a prayer can only point at anecdotes better explained by coincidence. This whole aesthetic stance that insists that supernatural forces don't proceed by logic, that you can't systematize them into regular laws, that their mechanisms aren't repeatable or predictable, has at its root the simple fact that real-world mystical practices don't do anything. If you spend your entire life doing prayer vigils to cure cancer and only occasionally see a tumor go into remission after you do it, of course you're going to end up thinking that the supernatural realm is mysterious and capricious.

(If any believer in supernatural forces is bothered by these remarks, please come up with a prayer that an impartial third party can verify actually cures cancer, and only then you get to yell at me.)

I can summarize the Boo Rules position this way: “Fictional magic shouldn't make sense because real-world magic doesn't.”

My response is: Real-world magic doesn't make sense because it doesn't work, so fictional magic based on (already known to be ineffective) real-world magic won't impress me much.

What prompted this post was a recent Bluesky thread by historian Bret Deveraux, which reignited the whole discussion and said this in its conclusion:

I'd encourage aspiring fantasy writers or world-builders to try to get a bit beyond their own modern thinking in order to develop rich worlds.

Earlier in the same thread, he said:

I can absolutely imagine a pre-modern fantasy society with magic understanding it this way, even if their magic works on regular physics-like principles. You absolutely could have a viewpoint character who wields magic and understands what works, but not why.

This, right here, is what boggles me: why on Earth would you ever want to pursue, and evoke in others, the experiential state of not understanding? In the end, this is what the “numinous” actually implies. To feel the numinous is to feel confused. This is why I don't consider the numinous to be a worthy aesthetic effect: in the real world, what people call numinous is only ever caused by incomplete knowledge (which, in turn, often comes from faulty reasoning), and I find it abhorrently beneath human dignity to treat our defects in reasoning with any reverence.

Devereaux does make a valid point here:

of course there's no reason that, in a fictional world, magic needs to follow physical laws at all, especially if magic is tied to something like the soul or the divine. Gods are not constrained by physics—so why should magic be?

That part is true; nothing in the writing craft forbids that you invent a world governed by totally random forces. But because randomness lacks intention, you wouldn't be able to credibly use such random magic to express any coherent theme in your story.

Devereaux then adds:

I think the demand for 'hard' fully systematized magic systems sometimes stems from this sort of failure of imagination to understand that to the ancients, even physics was a 'soft' magic system.

It's one thing to be informed about how the ancients thought. It's a noble and respectable endeavour; it is, indeed, how Devereaux makes a living. It's a different thing to take that mode of thought as an example to follow. Devereaux criticizes logical magic for being too modern. His core argument is: Even physics, which is fundamentally real and logical, was perceived by the ancients as something mysterious and ineffable, therefore even a world where magic is real and logical will have people who perceive magic as something mysterious and ineffable.

The problem with that argument is that none of us are pre-modern writers with pre-modern positions to express. Remember the Norsemen and their rainbow bridge? Why would we encourage anyone to cultivate a state of mind that understood the world less?

And I'll further add, as the conclusion to my argument:

Fictional magic should make sense because stories should make sense.

—Arturo

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